Digital Joe #25

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I will freely admit to being a daydreamer. I like to imagine what I would do in different situations, what life would be like if only and other things of that ilk. Maybe that´s why I´m such a movie fan: the images on the screen show me a different reality from what I see in my everyday world. My daydreams create a world that doesn´t truly exist. Sometimes it´s a place where there is no hate or violence, sometimes I dream of a place where the only thing that is produced for the screen are films like The Lord of the Rings and Shrek (ie. good movies). I´ve even gone as far as to create entire stories in my head to give structure to my dreams. I think that´s why I enjoy creative writing as much as I do.

For the longest time, I created a fantasy world of what a relationship should be to me. Of course, this scenario always included impossibly beautiful people, nary a negative word on either side and nights of passionate…well, you get the idea. All the movies and television programs I had ingested led me to think that was what life was supposed to be like. Of course I knew better, but that´s part of the allure of entertainment, isn´t it? To give us an escape from our daily lives, to see a place better than what we currently have.

I have no problem distinguishing the fantasy world from the real world. In fantasy land, there are monsters who come after teenagers in their sleep and alien creatures who lay eggs in your stomach. In reality, nothing stalks us in our dreams and the only thing that can lay eggs in my stomach is particularly nasty seafood. It´s easy to separate that kind of fantasy from reality. It´s much harder, however, to differentiate the entertainment that looks, sounds and acts like real life.

In my world, I don´t get out of bed looking like Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Beach". I don´t have the incredibly ripped body of Chad Allen from "Third Man Out". And my job isn´t nearly as funny as anything we see in "Office Space". To tell you the truth, I get out of the bed looking like an ogre (worse than Shrek, I´d imagine) and I always know if I overdid some eating the night before, too. But it´s so darn easy to project the things we see on the screen onto the people in our lives.

C´mon, ya´ll know I speak the truth on this one. It´s a stereotype, but don´t wives and girlfriends want to believe that their significant other will eventually act romantically like the guys in the movies? And don´t the guys usually silently pray that the gal in their lives wants to sit and watch three baseball playoff games back-to-back-to-back in one night? There are dozens of other things we all would like our lives to be like.

But it´s simply not possible, now is it? The moving pictures we see are constructs of a simulated world where everything is neatly ordered and arranged, where everyone reads from the same script and there are no surprises. I have a friend who believes the world would be much better off if we spontaneously burst into musical numbers at the drop of a hat. I´m not so sure he´d think like that if he ever heard my singing voice, but that´s besides the point.

The thing is, there is no script and everything isn´t pre-planned. There isn´t a director standing over my shoulder right now telling me I should be intently staring at the computer screen like so many writers do in the movies. Movies and TV shows are fantastic entertainment, great ways to get away from the rigors of our lives and enjoy a little bit of fantasy. But we run into real world problems when we try to make our lives a production.

I think I´m guilty of this more than just about anyone I know. Watching as many movies as I do (why, three just this week, in fact), I can´t help to say "gee, it would be cool if situation X or person Y was just like the stuff I just saw". Granted, after tonight´s screening of "Crash" I don´t want anyone or anything in my world to be like the people in that movie. But, generally speaking, I find something in a movie I think life should be like and try to make it that way.

Most of time, no shock here, the results are depressing.

I´ve had to learn-quite hard, recently-that I am an ordinary person living in my ordinary little world where nothing really remarkable is going to happen anytime soon. I´m not going to solve a murder, come across a briefcase with $10,000,000 in it or have the perfect relationship. On that last one, I think I´ve been especially guilty.

What I´ve had to learn is that there is no perfect relationship. Some people thrive on constantly being on the move and never stopping. Others are perfectly content to not have a relationship because they simply don´t want to be. The world isn´t made up of one kind of relationship (or anything else, for that matter). What is perfect to me might be downright dull for someone else.

I know this. Yet there are times, this week especially, I couldn´t help but look at something I watched and say "damn, that´s what I want my life to be like." And, I´ll freely admit to this, I´ve found myself trying to push in that direction. Of course, when I did, I immediately throttled back what I was doing and reminded myself of what I was doing.

It´s not the films I know are fantasy that give me a problem. It´s the ones that take place in the real world with real "people" and real situations. What I-and I have to believe everyone-have to remember is that our world isn´t an entertainment production; it´s the world we create for ourselves. There are two choices, as I see it: we can either make what we have be the best it can possibly be within the parameters in which we work or we can constantly try to find that movie relationship, that television show best friend or whatever else it is we think we need.

Me? I don´t want to lose my daydreaming-it gives my mind something to do during deadly dull parts of the podcasts I listen to. No, I have to keep training my mind to remember the difference between reality and the movies. I thought I had learned this lesson quite a while ago. Apparently, I haven´t. I´m going to keep at it, though. I know I´ve got a pretty good world right now.

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